Marketing is getting involved in many more areas that touch the customer along the buying process, multiplied by a dizzying variety of new tactics, online communications and engagement platforms. In my mind, this common thread should be the customer’s buying process (instead of the vendor’s planning hierarchy). But that's content for another blog post.

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EVERYTHING TECHNOLOGY MARKETING

JANUARY 1, 2011

[Process] The Top-10 B2B Marketing Trends for 2011

6 - Focus on pull/inbound marketing tactics This reflects the continued power shift of buyers moving firmly into the driver’s seat, initiating, and controlling the buying process. Happy New Year! It is January and time again for the obligatory 2011 predictions. Many marketing experts have strong opinions on what they think will happen in 2011. What marketing areas are less important in 2011?

If you are not thinking about (and implementing) a strategy that puts your buyers (with their persona and industry driven pain points, preferences, and buying stages) in the center of your marketing efforts - and create compelling content as the currency of your engagement with buyers that influences decisions along the buying process - now is the time. Happy New Year!

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EVERYTHING TECHNOLOGY MARKETING

MARCH 14, 2011

[Process] 8 Tips for Marketing SaaS and Software in the Cloud

2) Re-focus messaging from product to buyer While more direct access to the decision maker and buying authority may simplify the decision process to some extent, it requires marketing to better understand the underlying business problem the cloud solution is solving. The cloud is all the rage these days. What does this mean for B2B marketers selling cloud solutions and software as a service?

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EVERYTHING TECHNOLOGY MARKETING

MAY 24, 2010

[Process] The Brave New World of B2B Marketing - Are You Ready?

Clearly presented, educating the reader along every step of their decision making process. How do they impact the buying process? 7 - Performance Measurement With regular reviews of actual performance against goals, you can quickly identify areas for improvement, opportunities for resource re-allocation, process changes, and further education. More on this later.

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EVERYTHING TECHNOLOGY MARKETING

APRIL 8, 2010

[Process] 5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success

They want to be able to engage with a vendor when they are ready and actively seek out advice, often very late in the buying cycle, and have the vendor guide them through a complex buying and problem solving process - outsourcing part of the buying process to the vendor community if you will. Prospects and customers are becoming more sophisticated and better informed than ever before.

Content marketing is one of the most popular strategies deployed by today's B2B marketers to attract and engage prospects, and guide them through the buying process. But how do marketers measure content marketing success? We asked 20,000 members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn what metrics they use to measure the success of their content marketing initiatives. Over 500 people responded - and here is a preview of the results. Leads, leads, leads With 73 percent of all responses, leads are the number one metric used to gauge content marketing success.
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Because B2B marketing teams needs to have a sound understanding and definition of the target market segments first in order to create compelling messages and content that addresses segment-specific business drivers and pain points, guides buyers through the buying process, and enables mass customized marketing and automated email nurturing campaigns that execute based on prospects' demographics and behaviors. Marketing segmentation is about subdividing markets into segments of customers that have similar needs and behaviors. In complex markets, segmentation is not trivial.
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Step 5 - Nurture Leads Along the Buyer’s Journey Follow-up content pieces, such as webcast #2 and #3 in a series of 3 webcasts, require the buyer to complete a lightweight registration form - as they enter your marketing system with lead scoring, routing, and nurturing processes. One of my recent posts (“ The Top-10 B2B Marketing Trends for 2011 ”) received a lot of great comments. John Cook’s comment to the blog post got straight to the point: "How do you accomplish this”? Conversion Metrics More Important This question is being asked more frequently. Great question.
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Especially the top-3 challenges have grown significantly from 2009 to 2010: 1) Generating high-quality leads (from 69% in 2009 to 78% today) - Today's B2B marketers are tackling this issue with processes and technologies such as marketing automation and lead scoring in an attempt to only deliver qualified, truly sales ready leads. According to MarketingSherpa , the top challenges for B2B marketers are becoming, well, more challenging. 3) Marketing to a lengthening sales cycle (39% to 41%) - Also a function of the economic environment.
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This is where the field of marketing operations (MO) has received a lot of attention lately as a new marketing function designed to create cross-company alignment, performance visibility, and the foundational systems and processes that enable marketing to scale, become more effective and efficient, and contribute to company goals. Such a systematic marketing operations approach brings structure, process and accountability to the marketing function. Where is the return on the millions of Dollars invested in marketing? What happens if I cut your budget by 20 percent?
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[Process] Put an End to Flying Blind: A Ten-Step Process for Creating a Go-to-Market Tactical PlanEVERYTHING TECHNOLOGY MARKETING |
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009

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